CU-Boulder researcher's cameras confiscated after report links them to spying on China

Ulyana Horodyskyj stands in front of a chunk of ice during her field research of a glacier in Nepal in November. The huge ice block collapsed off of the Ngozumpa Glacier during a drainage event earlier in the year.
(
COURTESY Ulyana Horodyskyj
)

A University of Colorado researcher studying glacial melt in the Himalayas is out two time-lapse cameras -- and the valuable data they had recorded -- after someone absconded with the instruments following a Nepalese TV news report linking them to spying on China.

Ulyana Horodyskyj, a CU doctoral candidate studying glaciology, installed three solar-powered cameras 4,800 meters up a glacial peak in a Nepalese national park in June 2011. The location was about 20 kilometers from the border with the tumultuous Tibetan region of China.

The cameras were pointed at three lakes on the Ngozumpa Glacier. In 2011, they captured the alarming rapid draining and slower refilling of one lake that indicated faster melting than the researchers had expected.

Local Sherpas retrieved data cards from the cameras last summer and installed new ones, and Horodyskyj was making her way up to the site in November to remove the cameras entirely and retrieve that data. She arrived to find two of them gone.

"They were in an obvious location. They were on a trail," she said Tuesday, noting that one camera, in a harder-to-spot location, was left intact. "It looked like they were forcibly removed. They were drilled and bolted in."

While Horodyskyj -- who is now back in Boulder -- never filed any paperwork before installing the cameras, she said the locals were aware of her research and she had placed them near an established World Wildlife Fund weather station. She put a notice on them -- in both English and Nepali -- that read, "Please do not disturb, Glacier Research Project, University of Colorado."

Advertisement

She said she never suspected government officials might remove them, but that is her theory in the wake of their disappearance.

"On my way up the valley there was a ranger sitting in a dining hall at one of the lodges with us, and he was talking about some cameras that were where they weren't supposed to be," Horodyskyj said. "But I didn't really think he was talking about my cameras."

It was in a Nov. 6 email from a University of Massachusetts graduate student that Horodyskyj said she first learned her research had been linked to spying. The student, Uttam Babu Shrestha, originally from Nepal, wrote in his email that he had viewed a TV news report that "vilified" Horodyskyj's work as a "spying act."

Shrestha said in the email that he wrote a blog about the report, aired on Nepal's "Power News," faulting the station for not doing proper research for the story. A fellow climate researcher, Shrestha also attempted to warn Horodyskyj of the impending removal of the cameras.

"The reason I am contacting you is it became such a bad rumor in Nepal and authority has sent personals to pull the cameras out if they are unauthorized," he wrote. "I just want to help somebody's research."

When Horodyskyj presented her findings from the first melt season her cameras recorded at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December 2011, she named her news conference: "Eye Spy with my Camera Eye." She never dreamed anyone could have taken that literally and said the "Power News" reporter seemed to have an agenda.

"There was no fact checking done at all," she said. "It seems like he had an idea and ran with it."

The cameras, programmed to capture bits of video every four hours during the melt season, each cost about $300 and were outfitted with solar panels worth between $50 and $60. The three rigs ate up all $1,000 of a U.S. Agency for International Development grant that Horodyskyj received for the work, she said, but the money doesn't bother her. It's the data that was on the two memory cards.

She said there was a 7-meter drop in water level in one of the lakes that happened after it already froze over -- something that has never been documented before. While she has before and after photos, her cameras would have given a more accurate time frame for how quickly the drainage may have occurred.

She is focusing on the next step in her research: returning to the glacier in May to set up as many as 10 cameras around the lower spillway lake below the glacier to capture drainage there.

She will also conduct a field workshop instructing Sherpas how to download data and maintain instruments, a critical step in launching a Sherpa-Scientist Initiative intended to give the locals "ownership" of the data and research of the glaciers that are critical to their daily lives.

For her upcoming trip, Horodyskyj does not intend to leave the purpose of her camera open to any kind of interpretation or speculation.

"This spring and summer is really my big season to get the rest of my data. I'm in the process of applying for all the permits and paperwork," she said, noting she is seeking funding for a fourth and final trip to the glacier in October to collect the last bit of information. "And hopefully, at the end, I'll have a thesis."

Article Comments

We reserve the right to remove any comment that violates our ground rules, is spammy, NSFW, defamatory, rude, reckless to the community, etc.

We expect everyone to be respectful of other commenters. It's fine to have differences of opinion, but there's no need to act like a jerk.

Use your own words (don't copy and paste from elsewhere), be honest and don't pretend to be someone (or something) you're not.

Our commenting section is self-policing, so if you see a comment that violates our ground rules, flag it (mouse over to the far right of the commenter's name until you see the flag symbol and click that), then we'll review it.

The Boulder alt-country band gives its EPs names such as Death and Resurrection, and its songs bear the mark of hard truths and sin. But the punk energy behind the playing, and the sense that it's all in good fun, make it OK to dance to a song like "Death." Full Story